Week 9

This week was hand in week and was forced to stay up till the sunrise hours to make sure the work was done and at a good standard.
We finally finished the animatic this week and it came out pretty good. The presentation went well. During the aniamtic I did notice a few problems and a few scenes that we could cut down or remove to shorten the length of the film. Also the animatic showed the ending to be about 20-30 seconds too long, so next week I think me and Becca are going to have to re look over the ending and my some drastic cut backs. I do believe it’ll make the story fit better once we have done that.

The presentation with Mike this week could have gone a lot better than it did. I found myself tripping over my words and loosing my place even with the presentation guide that I designed to keep me on track when I explained the topics that I am covering in the essay. I did like talking to the group that I was in as it forced me to talk in front of other people to which I can sometimes be a little hesitant.

With all the researched collected and development of the essays, I began to write them this week. Even with the collected work I still had trouble with writing the essays. However I still managed to get them completed.

Overall this week was very manic and tiresome but all is done now. The group project will commence as soon as possible after a little rest I think.

Week 8

This week was the last build up to next. This week I saw to prep work ready for next week to make my life a lot easier. The animatic kept creating problems so that had to be taken care of immediately since it was going to be shown next week. I spent the whole weekend redrawing the opening scene as I knew my first images weren’t that strong.

Regarding the essay I looked into them a lot more but not to a strenuous level. I do find them daunting struggle to get the motivation to start them, but once I have there’s not normally a problem.

Colour Concept

Week 7

This week was quite interesting as at we had most of our storyboards done. The only problem that we had was the journey process of the Stamp Collector. We had been thinking about this for some time now and it got to the point where we had to decide this week on how we want it to look. Talking to fellow students again we came to some form idea which finally got picked after we assessed all other options. The idea was for the Stamp Collector to travel through his own the stamp box which I suppose shows his obsession with his own stamps.

My presentation to Gareth went quite well. I thought the information that I had collected wasn’t strong enough to support my argument but it turned out it was ok. With these presentations they sometimes make my skin cruel, however they improve my confidence in talking to groups.

Stamp Test colours

Week 6

With this week showed Becca my thumbnails and she showed me a couple of hers. We came up with some good visuals for the rest of the storyboards. That took us all week planning the shots and trying to use filmatic language.

Also this week, we had a presentation with Mike. The presentation went ok but I didn’t have enough information to go with my topic and I was all jumbled up when I spoke. I was still feeling the effects form last week. That’s my excuse anyways!

After Gareth’s lesson I chose an area that I liked which happened to be a round marketing in the animation industry. I found this a fairly strong topics me to talk about in next weeks presentation.



Research Journey Animations
Using YouTube

Zeev's Journey 3D Animation
Animation Pub Go Travel
Travel Diary

Journey Concept

Week 5

This week proved to be a big problem for me as I caught a big dose of ‘MAN-FLU’. I was unable to come into college to work on the film. I ended up calling Becca to sort out what I could attempt to do at home, work wise. Since we agreed on ­­ the story we decided to produce thumbnail storyboards. I decided to do the open scene up to the journey. I struggled quite a bit to produce those thumbnails but I’m glad I did them as we would have lost even more time. At this stage into production and having the script crisis we could not afford a break or no work to be produced.

Locations Visited During Journey

Script writing development

Ideas to set the character in opening scene

Squirrel Appearance

A squirrel approaches the house and jumps onto a window ledge. The window is open and the squirrel sees nuts in a bowl which are at easy reach. He checks that the coast is clear and gauges himself. A big arm chair situated in front of the chair spins around and we see the stamp collector for the first time to which flicks something at the squirrel knocking him off the window ledge.

Ball

On his way out to collect his long awaited stamp he finds a ball on his drive. He picks it up and sees a very young child at the end of his path waiting for his ball. As he closes his gate the kid looks at him wanting his ball back. Two out comes from here…..

1. He pops the ball and chucks it into the bin and then carries on with his journey. With the stamp collector gone the kid upset at this point goes into the bin and retrieves his deflated ball.

2. He takes the ball and turns left out of his front porch and walks on until he is obscured by a big bush (the kid hasn’t moved from the gate). Suddenly we see the ball come flying from the busy and knock down the boy to the ground, for comedy affect.

Flowers

On his way to get the stamp he sees pretty vibrant flowers growing from his porch and with in a second he stamps and kicks them down.

Cookie Girl

A girl selling cookies pulling a small red kart knocks at the door. The stamp collector gets up from his arm chair and makes his way over to the door and opens it. As the door beings to open the girl starts to use her pitch to sell her cookies and within a split second he closes the door.

Neighbor

The neighbor waves at the stamp collector, but he completely ignores him and goes on his way.



­Story Development


Stamp collectors wife is getting fed up with obsession with he stamps and his obsessive and compulsive disorder and gives away the prize stamp to some boy scouts etc……


Island/Hill

The story is set on an island. The stamp collector lives at the top of the hill on the island surrounded by small houses, a few fields and lots of forestry scattered around. The story has the same beginning up to the point where the stamp fly’s out of the window. The stamp collector chases after the stamp as it gets carried by the wind down the hill. He has to dodge obstacles and sees many new things and reminders on his way down, since he hasn’t been down this way for quite a while. At the start of the journey he is very hunched over and he slowly loosens up as the journey progresses and sits up right. The reason for his hunched appearance is because he is obsessed in on one thing only (the stamp) and has forgotten what’s around him………….


Boot sale

The collector lives on the island away from the girl living on the beach. The girl on is having a jumble sale and happens to be selling the stamp the collector needs. He offers a price for the stamp but the girl doesn’t seem to be interested in money which creates a difficult situation. It turns out that she wants to trade the stamp but gives the collector no indication of what exactly she would like. He comes back her house on the beach to trade something from his house and she just turns him away. The collector does the same thing over and over again and she just keeps turning him down. Eventually he does find something of significant value, something sentimental to trade with her and he finally gets the stamp.

The stamp collector shows the little girl (possibly his granddaughter) his stamp collection with a magnifier glass. As the magnifier glass passes over each stamp, we see the stamp collector traveling in that country to retrieve his ultimate stamp.

A similar idea still after the ultimate stamp we travel through postcards but the scenes are like pop up and artistic.

We travel through the use of his passport to get the stamp. As we go through each location, we acquire and new stamp expressing that area. We could show the checking area where a bloke sits behind his desk checking all passports upon entering the country. For comedy value we could have the same bloke checking the passports but as we go to all the different countries takes on a different persona to match that of the country the stamp collector is in.

Needs to become colorful again

Week 4

With this week we were still re writing the script and it was clear it was getting to both me and Becca. Even thou we set deadlines for the story to be finalised we find out the story doesn’t fit well or there was problems. We completely explored the whole story in all directions just to make the story work well. Whilst we were going through this process I hate the fact that the story worked in my head but when we told the tutors about the changes they showed us floors in our ideas. At the end of this week finally had to story lines, one being the new and developed story line and the original story line since we still both like it. It did have quite a few changes within it to make it fit better but it worked nicely. With the two stories we pitched them to a few other fellow students and got their personal opinion. They liked the reworked original story which was good news since we did favour that story more. We pitched it again to the tutors and they confirmed that it was good.


Story Deveoplement

The Collectors Motivations

1. Letting go, you can’t get every stamp (can’t have everything).
2. Being nice is more important than what you want (material possession).
3. The need to have exactly what you want doing anything to get it.
4. Grumpy, anti-social, kind of old man, boring, discovers a nice side.


The Stamp collector

A nice person
He’s just obsessed with stamps that he’s forgotten how to consider others feelings
He’s quite boring and mundane
There’s no colour in his life (Like in the Incredibles)


Places Visited During the Journey

After looking at the possible areas to which the stamp could travel through. We decided to have the stamps travel fairly realistic, going through countries next to each other rather than jumping all around the globe.

To Hawaii

Via: America
Mexico
Brazil

To Hawaii
Through Europe

Via: France
Italy
Holland
Egypt
India
China/Japan
Australia

Week 3

With this week showed Becca my thumbnails and she showed me a couple of hers. We came up with some good visuals for the rest of the storyboards. That took us all week planning the shots and trying to use filmatic language. Also this week, we had a presentation with Mike. The presentation went ok but I didn’t have enough information to go with my topic and I was all jumbled up when I spoke. I was still feeling the effects form last week. That’s my excuse anyways! After Gareth’s lesson I chose an area that I liked which happened to be a round marketing in the animation industry. I found this a fairly strong topics me to talk about in next weeks presentation.

Week 2

At the start of this week I assumed that there would be roughly 3-5 people working for Becca’s film including me, however arriving and meeting Becca this wasn’t the case. Turned out I was the only 100% committed person that applied for her film. She did get part-time offers to work for the film which is still very helpful further down the line. With this week Becca re-pitched her story to me so I knew exactly how she saw it at this stage. She also had some nice concept art pieces that she knocked up over the holidays which helped greatly to visually see her view of the story. Over the rest of this week myself and Becca sat down and began script writing the story. We came up with what we thought was a good story. We then decided to pitch it to one of the tutors the following week.

Week 1

This week was the first time back after the summer holidays and we had to pitch our film ideas that we thought up during the break. I had the idea of a civilisation living on the bottom of a shoe in some chewing gum. I did like this idea and thought it could have been really creative if picked. In the end it wasn’t chosen but I liked the sound of quite a few other films that were pitched that day. We had the rest of the week to reflect over what film ideas we liked best. There were two stories that I liked and they were the chicken farm story by Luke and Becca’s Stamp Collector. Out of the two stories I decided to work on Becca’s film as it is a lot different to the type of work and story line that I’m into.

Term 1